Every year, The Channel Company’s CRN Annual Report Card (ARC) Survey recognizes the best-in-class vendors in the categories of partnership, support and product innovation. For more than 30 years, thousands of solution providers have cast their votes, and this year’s honorees were selected based on the results of an in-depth survey by The Channel Company’s research team.

The world is changing at record speed. Business as usual no longer exists. To stay ahead, customers are demanding technology that enables them to quickly adapt to changing business conditions, now and in the future. Today’s business leaders must be champions of change. Dell’s Enterprise Solutions Group helps businesses get more value from IT investments, adopt emerging technologies rapidly, and turn IT into an engine of innovation that’s future-ready.

With the increasing amount of both structured and unstructured data being generated every day, businesses are seeing the advantages of analyzing Big Data to increase revenue, reduce costs, and minimize business risk. But along with that seismic shift in the ability to use data to manage a business comes the need for a totally new infrastructure. Businesses are looking for an integrated solution that stores and analyzes Big Data for real-time, rapid analytics, and predictive modeling.

December of last year, I traveled to New York to participate in a Windows Migration Roundtable event with Dell. I joined Dell executives, a customer and media to discuss Windows Server 2003 end of support; how we, as a channel partner, can play a critical role in migration projects; and why organizations should look to channel partners to help implement and execute migrations and infrastructure modernization projects.

Cloud security concerns are starting to dissolve away as security technology and risk management practices mature in cloud and virtualized environments. But there's still one niggling barrier that won't go away if cloud providers aren't more proactive in tearing it down: transparency.